


Stars Like Embers

by the_musical_alchemist



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-06
Updated: 2017-06-09
Packaged: 2018-11-09 19:42:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11111502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_musical_alchemist/pseuds/the_musical_alchemist
Summary: A collection of the drabbles I wrote for Royai Week 2017!





	1. a trick of light

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day 2 Prompt: "Black Tie"

The first military ball is the hardest. She steps under the ballroom’s opulent chandelier and he’s awed by the crystalline refractions raining over her skin. Short blonde hair curls delicately over the nape of her neck. The high back of her pale blue dress is elegant, like a tide washing over the weathered remains of her past. It’s a beautiful illusion that Roy has the burden of seeing through.

After tonight, she will peel the dress away from the terror branded to her skin. Every day, she is forced to live with their mistakes. The sharp scent of her blood still has yet to disappear from Roy’s hands. He hopes it never will. It’s a suitable penance.

She gives him a smile. He holds her gaze like it’s a veil he’s terrified to drop. Beneath it she’s the broken killer trembling at an Ishvalan child’s grave, the sobbing girl begging Roy to release her from her father’s alchemy; she’s the scarred woman underneath the dress.

They don’t speak to each other. There aren’t enough days in a lifetime to hold the words tumbling through his brain right now. She is the first to avert her eyes and between blinks, she is swept into the bustling crowd.

His black tie is too tight around his throat. When he breathes, it feels invasive – a noose he can’t remember having tied.

All of this is too lovely. He tries to fit into this celebration like an old key jammed into a new lock. But this is a place for soldiers, not killers dressed like heroes.

Is there a difference?

* * *

 

They dance together at the next one. By now, the words he’s withheld have found their way to her through a language exclusive to them. Their shared anguish and everlasting dreams are how they learned to understand the obscure nuances of each other.

He holds her at a professional distance, his hand light as a feather at her waist. There isn’t any time to analyze what they are to each other. It would be like trying to give philosophical meaning to the air. There isn’t a profound need to explain something that keeps you alive. It just does.

“You look good in black,” she says. It’s matter-of-fact. Almost reverential despite the implications.

“You look good with long hair,” he says back.

It falls over her shoulders now. Beautiful waves of gold over the crimson color of her dress. It hugs her body in all the right ways. She looks tantalizingly soft.

“There’s a simplicity in it that I like,” she says as he twirls her under his arm. She falls back into their rhythm, resting her hand on his shoulder. “It reminds me of a little girl I met. She was very kind.”

Indeed, the world they’ve both shown so much cruelty is also capable of something so gentle. He wonders if the two of them can reclaim some of that kindness and give it back to everyone they’ve hurt. If that’s what it means to use their strengths, knowledge, and drive for the children who will one day inherit this country.

“It suits you,” he says, smiling at her.

* * *

 

After too much praise and hyperbolized recounts of the Promised Day from soldiers who would probably find the actual events far less interesting, Roy and Riza slip away from Fuhrer Grumman’s inauguration party.

They walk onto a quiet balcony, bitten by the chill of night. Riza wraps her shawl around her shoulders and leans up against a railing, looking over trees glowing under moonlight. She closes her eyes, peacefully drinking in the silence.

Roy comes up next to her and bumps her shoulder with his. She lets out a chuckle, shaking her head.

“I keep asking myself how we made it,” she admits.

Roy’s eyes land on the pale white scar peeking through the high collar of her dress. He isn’t certain whether the chill running through his veins is a result of the cool air or the memory of the light bleeding from her eyes.

“Together,” he replies. It’s simple, but having her by his side has always been easy. They survive because while they fight with blazing hearts and set their own impossibly bright fires, they continue to save each other too.

She nods and he wraps his arm around her shoulders. Innately, she leans in. He thinks of that first ball after the war, and how his place in the military felt flimsy and unreal. Right now, he couldn’t possibly fit anywhere else.

There are scars under her dress and years of pain branded to and far beneath her skin. He’s far from the naive idealist he once was. The two of them are mosaics of their own broken stories that have somehow overlapped with each other’s again and again. It’s all part of being human.


	2. Horizon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day 4 Prompt: "Promises"

_I promise._

It first passes between them the day they bury her father. They stand in a dusty study saying nothing, but baring themselves as completely as they ever have before.

One by one, with agonizing foreboding, the buttons of her blouse come undone. Roy watches the fabric pool around her feet when it drops. Silently, she lowers her head, voice captured in the room’s stillness as she allows the array branded onto her back to speak for her.

He feels horror, anger, yearning, wonder, and a deeply unsettling knot of fear. Everything he’s worked toward obtaining is right in front of him, alive and in motion, shifting as she breathes as if Riza and flame alchemy are a single entity. This secret belongs to her. From her heart to his hands, it’s a selfless gift.

Roy doesn’t touch her. He doesn’t ask any questions. He only accepts it with gratitude and the very same altruism she is showing him by tying their fates together.

At the end of the day, the two sit together in the living room, mugs of tea gone cold on the coffee table in front of them. Through the window, they watch the sun set in peaceful silence. When gold light fades to silver, Riza’s head drowsily rests on Roy’s shoulder.

He closes his eyes, the feel of her keeping him centered. The two of them share an extraordinary secret, but a potentially terrible burden too.

“Thank you,” Roy murmurs. “I promise I’ll do right by this.”

Like this, they drift to sleep.

* * *

 _I promise_.

His hands shake when he draws her in. This is how he knows he’s a monster; for only a monster can hold a person with the same bloodstained hands that continue to hurt them over and over again. Her body shakes with sobs and rather than let her go, rather than have the mercy and decency to set her free, he holds her tighter.

Roy runs a hand through her short hair and over the bandages wrapped around her torso. He wants to tell her that he’s sorry. He wants to promise he’ll never hurt her again. He wants to fall apart himself and cry until his voice gives out.

“Hawkeye,” he whispers miserably, unable to even call her by name. How did they get here? When did they forget how to be human? When did he lose the right to Riza Hawkeye’s heart?

Her fingers grip the back of his shirt. She clings to him so desperately, as if there isn’t anyone else in the world who could keep her head above water – as if only Roy can truly understand who they became and how they abused the very thing they vowed to use to save the world.

His shirt muffles her cries, so full of the pain she carries for them both. Her shuddering sobs make Roy all at once wish he could endure the agony for her and be anywhere but here.

“Never again,” he chokes out, burying his nose into her hair. “I won’t let this happen ever again. I promise. _I promise_.”

* * *

 _I’ll follow you into Hell_.

She stands before him a stone-faced, reassembled version of his master’s daughter. Roy can see the war replaying in her haunted eyes and he can’t seem to look away. It’s captivatingly, _masochistically_ , familiar.

He looks at her, knowing what lay under her uniform. He listens to her, remembering the sound of her wailing in his arms. He speaks to her as if he didn’t transmute her trust into the most destructive weapon ever wielded by this country.

She doesn’t promise to rectify it all, at least not with so many words. This journey has already been nothing but a series of empty, broken promises. Instead, she squares her shoulders, and salutes him. It’s cold and unfamiliar, but the naive dreamers they once were are now buried in bloodsoaked sand far beyond reach.

No, she doesn’t placate him with flowery words or optimistic dreams; their bloody hands can no longer carry them. Promises are too kind.

She says, “I’ll follow you into Hell.”

* * *

They collect years like weeds and flowers, each horror accompanied by some beauty. Battles come and they fight. They never truly win, as there are no winners in war. Each victory is another step forward, another new day.

Soon they will be buried under the weedless flowers picked by children who will never know what destruction lay dormant under their homes. If they fight for anything, it’s for this and for the luxury that they never find out.

Under the soft light of their hospital room, Riza runs her thumb gently over his face. The way he looks at her, _sees her_ for the first time in too long, holds her like a vise. She can’t look away, even if she wanted to.

“You’re okay,” she whispers.

His eyes fall closed and the spell breaks. Before something as distant and trivial as boundaries, repercussions, or self control can hold her back, they fall into a kiss. She’s ensnared by all of him – his arms, his lips, his body, his heart. She can’t break away, but maybe she doesn’t want to. His hands run up and down her body, like he needs to be touching every part of her to stay alive. She climbs on his lap, crushing his lips, breathing him in, running her fingers through his hair until they are no longer the two broken people they are, but a single, thriving life.

 _I promise_ , says his kiss. _I promise myself to you._


	3. 184 Letters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For Royai Week '17, Day 5: Letters
> 
> *WARNING FOR MAJOR CHARACTER DEATH*

In the company of still shadows and with the taste of liquor on his lips, he writes her a letter. Words he’s withheld anywhere the light could touch them pour from the end of his pen. His entire self, the ugly broken shards of his life, stain the page with the honesty and permanence of blood. In a way, he feels like he’s bleeding.

He wishes he could take their mistakes like stitching and unravel it from history. He wishes he could tell her how much he loves her, with words no more complicated than that.

_Riza, I love you._

_Riza, I love you._

_Riza, I love you._

His pen urgently scrapes against the page. His knuckles are white and trembling each time he scribbles her name, like it’s too devastatingly unfamiliar to him. Did she hear the truth in between his cries for her on that last day? Could she feel the way he clung to her a few seconds too long, too tight, too desperate, as her eyes dimmed and her body grew too heavy in his arms?

 _I’m sorry. I’m so sorry_.

He runs a hand through his disheveled hair, remembering how people used to say it made him look younger. When he looks in the mirror now, the years of his life have caught up to him, perhaps even surpassed him. He’s a stranger to himself without her.

The pen travels across the page, almost on its own accord, as promises form in the ink. This has always been most important to her. Not the military, not even their love for each other and their friends, but the ideals that would one day form a peaceful world. He was the adventurer and she was his compass. Separately, they were clever; together, they could find blinding white universes among the shadows cast over them.

 _I’ll join you on the other side of our journey_.

It isn’t over. He won’t rest until he’s done everything he can to make her proud – to leave this world only after it’s become the one they both dreamed of.

He reads over the letter, thinking, _This time I’ll leave it with her. This time she’ll receive it. This time, I’ll tell her every truth I’ve selfishly kept to myself._

But like he did yesterday and the day before that and every day since, he folds the letter in half and then again. It joins the other one hundred eighty three letters neatly arranged in a box kept under his bed.

When his legs are finally strong enough to move again and once the stinging in his eyes has gone away, he finds himself at the cemetery with flowers instead of his letters. They have always communicated with everything but words, after all.

The sunlight warms his skin, and the flowers of spring are in full bloom. It doesn’t make any sense to him how such resistant beauty can exist in a place where he feels so powerless. Though, maybe it should bring him some level of solace. Roy never liked the rain. When his time comes, he’s happy to know there will be sun.

He leaves the flowers at her grave beside a withered bouquet left by somebody else. Maybe Rebecca or Havoc or one of the Elrics. There’s no telling.

Maybe she can see him suffering. Maybe she’s read every single letter as he painstakingly wrote them. Or maybe the oblivion of death robbed her of that. He wonders which would be worse.

All he has left is hope.

His lips quirk into a watery smile. “Hi, Riza.”


End file.
